The Red Parts

by Maggie Nelson

  LET ME EXPLAIN, says the very first potential juror questioned at the voir dire. He’s Italian, about sixty, tan, wearing Birkenstocks, bald except for a squirrelly ponytail. I am an artist. I have the heart, the soul, of an artist. That means that in my world, there are no criminals. In my world, there are no crimes. In my world—he closes his eyes beatifically, gesturing out to an imaginary plain—everything is beautiful.

  The judge looks exasperated. If chosen for this jury, can you agree to live in this world, with the rest of us, right now?

  The artist shakes his head. I’m sorry, but I cannot. I cannot live in your world.

  INSTEAD OF quitting smoking, I find that my mother wants to smoke with me. She complains that my cigarettes are too strong, however, so I start buying ultra-lights for her, and breaking off their filters for me. If I’m going to smoke, I’m not going to try to suck blood from a stone.

  FOR A PORTION of this time there’s a summer street fair set up along Main Street, the Ann Arbor Arts Festival. My mother and I had heard about this fair before coming, and thought it might provide some relief, even some pleasure. Now getting spit out of the grim courthouse each evening into a bustling, cheerful mecca of corndog stands, bad landscape paintings, and glazed pottery makes us feel trapped in a Fellini movie.

  AT THE VOIR dire the judge asks all the potential jurors to swear that even if they regularly watch CSI, Law & Order, Cold Case Files, or any other television show featuring forensic science and criminal justice, that they have a firm grasp on the difference between television—even reality television—and reality itself, in which we are presumably now mired. One potential juror with several small children says that won’t be a problem for her, because she mostly watches the Cartoon Network; the judge quips that an afternoon spent with the Cartoon Network provides as much or more information about the criminal justice system as a full season of Law & Order.

  One by one, each juror solemnly swears to his or her capacity to distinguish between dramatization and reality, between fact and fiction. This strikes me as completely disingenuous. But then again, who’s going to sit there in the jury box and say, Actually, Your Honor, I admit it. I can’t tell the difference between representation and reality anymore. I’m very sorry.

  FOR THE FIRST three days of trial my mother and I arrive at the courthouse to find ourselves adrift in a sea of heavy-set, elderly men. Retired cops, detectives, ambulance drivers, and medical examiners waiting to testify in our case jam the corridors, ambling about on their canes, greeting each other with slaps on the back as if it’s a high school reunion. All of their bodies emanate a faded, patrician majesty, and seem stuffed into their civilian suits. Several of their faces drag with strokes. Many have slurred speech, and are either going deaf or are already there.

  I really can’t hear a word you’re saying, sighs the now-ancient morgue wagon driver who transported Jane’s body on the afternoon of March 21, 1969. All I know is that I came to the scene like I always did, and I loaded her up.

  Three days solid, eight hours a day, dozens of witnesses, no women. Just two male attorneys, the male judge, the male defendant, a coterie of male detectives, and a parade of male retirees recalling their interaction with Jane’s dead body, pictures of which they draw upon from the witness box with little laser pens. Nancy Grow is resubpoenaed, but she never reappears. Her doctor has submitted a note saying that the stress of testifying again on this matter would be mortally dangerous to her health. In her place Hiller shows the jury a digital recording of her January testimony. The quality of the footage is bad—Grow flickers in and out, looking even more distressed than she had in person. More disconcerting still is the appearance of my family on this recording, as we all come into view whenever the camera pans over to our bench. We look awful—washed-out, shocked, teary—a mirror image of ourselves today, except that now the cast of characters has thinned out, and we are no longer dressed for winter.

  And so Grow tells her story again. The same bloodstained bag, the same Maybe it’s a dummy, the same loafers and nightgown, the same screaming, the same shame, this time her grainy, sepia figure looking very much like the hologram of Princess Leia in Star Wars as she repeatedly appeals, Help me Obi-Wan Kenobi, you’re my only hope. Obi-Won, you’re my only hope.

  AS A RULE, my mother does not sleep well. After I go to bed at Jill’s I hear her fluttering around the house like a ghost. On good nights she talks excitedly to her new boyfriend on her cell phone; on bad nights she drinks wine until it’s gone, then rummages around for something else, anything else. Sits in the dark kitchen, drinking Kahlúa.

  But compared to my state, and compared to where she’s been, she is doing quite well. A couple of years ago, after a little over twenty years of marriage, her husband, the housepainter, left abruptly and cruelly. His departure, along with the messy divorce proceedings that ensued, plunged her headlong into loneliness and despair. Her anxiety about being alone for the first time in her life was acute: she could barely go to the grocery store, for example, because she thought strangers were pitying her for buying single servings of food.

  I tried to help at the beginning of this period, flying out to California to meet with her and her divorce lawyer, cleaning out my stepfather’s belongings from spaces that were too painful for her to enter. But one afternoon, while scrubbing down his walk-in closet with disinfectant at her request, I lost it. We had been here before. Twenty years earlier my mother and I had spent an afternoon together cleaning out my father’s closet a few weeks after his death, getting his house ready to sell. The same cardboard boxes, the same cylinder of Ajax. The same muted mania in the face of abandonment. Just us chickens.

  I had gone along then because I suspected there might be things of my father’s I wanted to keep, and there were. I also wanted to seem brave. More than that, I wanted to be brave, though I didn’t have a clue what that might entail. But my stepfather hadn’t died, he’d just split without saying good-bye, and I didn’t want to pay him the kindness of dealing with his stuff. Certainly I didn’t want any of it.

  The more needy my mother became, the less I could help her. Her habitual expression of affection—Don’t you know that I love you more than life itself?—began to sound like suicidal threat. Every time I went back to California, I swore on the plane ride back to New York that I would never, ever set foot in the state again. I stopped visiting, stopped calling. I let my sister take up the burden. Since she had been mostly absent for the many years that I lived at home, I told myself it was her turn.

  And she was good at it. Over the years Emily had seemingly discovered infinite stores of patience and compassion. After her two years of chopping wood in Idaho, she went on to college and graduated, Phi Beta Kappa, with a degree in women’s studies. She moved back to San Francisco, bought a beautiful little house with her girlfriend of many years, and started working for a series of nonprofits—Planned Parenthood, the Bay Area Labor Council. It was as though all of her anger and rebelliousness got shot through the machine of adulthood and came out the other side as political conviction, loyalty, and kindness. I envied her all the more for it. After years of feeling like the dutiful daughter, now I just felt like a complete shit. Clearly I’d missed the window of opportunity to make bad behavior seem glamorous or legendary. When you grow up and act badly, you just let people down.

  But no amount of distance or silence could diminish the pull of my mother from the opposite coast, three thousand miles away. I felt it daily as though we were perched on two ends of a long balancing stick. Every night I knew we were each making dinner for ourselves, listening to the radio, starting in on a bottle of wine. I knew we were each thinking of the other, each negotiating our shared store of anxieties and sorrows, each sustained—or hoping to be sustained—by our careers of teaching, reading, and writing.

  And now here we were, back in Michigan, walking to and from the courthouse day after day, each toting a legal pad. We take copious notes throughout the trial, as does Solly, Leit
erman’s wife. My mother and I never speak to Solly, but we hold doors open for one another with a quiet civility, perhaps in tacit acknowledgment of the fact that we can each see that the other’s situation here is just a different version of hell. Each morning all three of us send our pads through the court’s X-ray machine, where the security guard, who has somehow gotten wind of the fact that I wrote a book about Jane, greets me daily as “the author.”

  I hadn’t written on a legal pad for years. But now I was remembering that I started out writing many years ago on my father’s long yellow legal pads. After my parents’ divorce, my father occasionally found himself stuck with Emily and me on days when he had to go to work, and he would bring us with him “into the office”—a law firm perched atop a glorious skyscraper in downtown San Francisco. Once up there, to keep me busy, he would give me a legal pad and a pen. That way I could pretend that I, too, was hard at work. My job was to write down everything that happened in the room—my father’s hectic pacing, his wild gesticulations on the phone, visits from fellow lawyers, Emily’s annoying behavior, the view of the slate-gray harbor below.

  After my day of work I would hand my legal pads over to my father for his perusal. He thought they were brilliant. Back in the day when people unthinkingly used their secretaries for terribly inappropriate tasks, he asked his to type them up so they would look more “official”—one long story, told in episodes, entitled A Day at the Office.

  When I was nine or so this penchant for reportage swerved into an obsession with a tape recorder with which I attempted surreptitiously to record the conversations of my family and friends for about a year. This was before the dawn of the miniature age, the Age of the iPod, and my tape recorder was mammoth, about the size of a portable record player. I had to swaddle it in several blankets or jackets to make it “invisible.”

  My most successful covert recording from this time captured a conversation during a car ride in which my father was taking me, my best friend Jeanne, Emily, and her best friend China to an ice skating rink. At one point on the tape we pass by a car that has been pulled over by the cops. The pigs sure are out tonight, says my father. From the backseat eleven-year-old China warns that you have to be careful with cops. She says she recently heard a story about some cops who came upon a woman being raped, and instead of stopping the rape, they helped.

  They helped rape her, China clarifies.

  Who told you that? Your mother? my father asks.

  China’s mother was Grace Slick, of the Jefferson Airplane, by this point the Jefferson Starship.

  China cackles, then snorts.

  I can see it now, on your parents’ next album, my father says. “Snorts by China.”

  China snorts again.

  Then I pipe in: Daddy, why don’t women rape men?

  Good question, he muses. What do you think?

  I don’t think women have the passion, I say, with nine-year-old authority.

  That’s not why, Maggie, Emily says, deeply irritated. It’s not because they don’t have the passion.

  MY FATHER wanted me to be a writer. Actually he wanted me to be whatever I wanted to be. Anything I expressed interest in, he would cut out articles about and leave on my pillow for me to discover when I went to bed. In an attempt to make up for the hardship of the divorce, he let Emily and me decorate our rooms at his new house in any way we wanted. I wanted everything in rainbows. I got it. Emily wanted purple everything, purple lamp shades, purple carpet, purple bedspread. She got it, too.

  Our life with him in this house was colorful, hedonistic, and brief. Rainbows of light streamed through the stained-glass rainbow that dangled from gold string in front of my bedroom window. I got a pair of rainbow-striped overalls and wore them nearly constantly. He shepherded Stouffer’s Macaroni and Beef around on dinner plates and served them to us by candlelight. I performed improvised dance routines for him nightly in his living room, accompanied by loud music from his record collection. Tom Waits. Joni Mitchell. Harry Nilsson. Bob Dylan. He graciously watched these performances from the couch with a lowball of Jack Daniel’s in his hand, sometimes nodding off, but always clapping loudly and whistling after my final bow. Other nights he would play the guitar and sing while I climbed onto his back and held on like a monkey. Women came and went, women who would beg along with us, C’mon, Dad, let’s go get ice cream. At least two were named Candy. There were two Marthas, an Ellen, a Vicki, and two Wendys. At Christmas he bought boxes and boxes of silver tinsel for us to decorate the tree, as tinsel had been forbidden by my mother. Christmas at his house that year was an orgy of tinsel. He would die four weeks later.

  For her part, after the divorce my mother had become increasingly taken with the ideal of a minimalist Christmas tree: sparse branches that reached horizontally, decorated solely with white lights, red shellacked apples, and plaid bows. She also took to hanging up a red felt scroll with black-and-white photos of her new husband affixed to it, photos taken when he was a toddler, in the late ‘50s, sitting on Santa’s lap in a tweed overcoat and looking about as petulant as he looked to me now. Isn’t he adorable, she said each time she passed it. With a kind of measured sadism whose roots continue to elude me, each Christmas my stepfather would wrap up the Chinese Yellow Pages (which my mother couldn’t read) and blank VHS tapes (which she had no use for) to give to her as gifts, as if to remind her that he hated the holidays, hated gift-giving, and perhaps on some level hated her (and by extension, us), and that he was committed to performing these hatreds each year with a Dadaesque spirit of invention.

  But there was a trick: one year he planted a pair of real pearl earrings at the bottom of this pile of wrapped Wal-Mart garbage, so in subsequent years our mother never knew if a treasure were coming. It never did, but the tension remained high; her disappointment, acute.

  After several years of this my mother decided that we should start skipping Christmas altogether and go instead to Mexico, which we then did for a few years in a row. I remember my stepfather being there with us only once. I liked going to Mexico, which generally consisted of climbing steep ruins by day and getting drunk with my mother in beachside bars at night, but the trip always gave me the uneasy feeling that we were on the lam, running from something other than Christmas.

  IN COURT my mother and I quickly discover that sitting bench for eight or nine hours at a time on the bench is going to be hard on our bodies, so after the first week of the trial we strip the cushions off Jill’s porch furniture The Red Parts 104 and start bringing them to court. Solly also starts bringing a cushion. But the cushions only go so far. When I begin to have serious pain down one of my legs and in shoulder, I tell my mother that I might look into getting a massage somewhere in town.

  Go ahead, she says, but personally, she considers massages sybaritic.

  I don’t know what the word means, so I ignore both it and her.

  During the trial I try not to look at what my mother is writing down on her legal pad, but when I do, I notice that we gravitate toward the same details. And I begin to wonder if this is really her story to tell, and if I’m stealing it from her, even now.

  Weeks later, back in Connecticut, I look the word up. Sybarite: a person devoted to pleasure; a voluptuary. From the Latin Sybarita, a native of Sybaris, Italy, whose ancient Greek inhabitants were known for their “notorious luxury.”

  Apparently my mother also feels it is too sybaritic to sleep with the air conditioner on in her bedroom at Jill’s—she says it would be unfair to me, as I do not have one in my little hothouse of a room. The nights are terribly uncomfortable, however, so she ends up making a sort of compromise: each night she turns the air conditioner on, but leaves her windows and door wide open. I try to convince her of the idiocy of this enterprise but she’s resolute. During the first week, I get up in the middle of the night, climb out of my twin bed across the hall, and shut her door while she’s asleep. I want more privacy, and I suspect she will sleep better if she can at least get cool. But soon I tir
e of this ritual. After listening to her toss and turn one night, along with the loud, useless hum of the air conditioner, I strip the sheet off my bed, take it downstairs, and start sleeping on the couch.

  After Justice

  BECAUSE JANE’S boyfriend Phil was the last person to see Jane alive on March 20, 1969, the state has subpoenaed him to appear at the trial. But that’s not quite right: the state has asked him to appear, but it did not subpoena him, because you cannot subpoena someone who lives outside the United States. He agrees to come testify, and I find myself feeling a little guilty—I know he doesn’t want to, and I was the one who passed information about his whereabouts along to Schroeder back in November. At the time Schroeder joked that I should consider becoming a detective myself, as they’d been looking for Phil for some time with no luck. This perplexed me, as I had found him with one phone call and one overseas letter.

  In the time since, Phil and I have met twice for breakfast in Brooklyn, where he keeps an apartment; my mother and I have also flown to see him in London, where we visited for a week with him and his longtime partner, a healthcare activist named Henie. Seeing my mother and Phil greet each other at the London airport after more than thirty years apart made the whole psychotic enterprise of Jane seem momentarily worthwhile—restorative, even, albeit in a jagged sort of way.

  Phil arrives in Ann Arbor the night before he is to testify, and the state puts him up in the same motel in which my grandfather is staying the night. My mother and I plan to have dinner with Phil alone, partly to catch up, but partly to strategize his encounter with my grandfather. They haven’t seen each other since Jane’s funeral, and Phil knew then that her father did not approve of him or the relationship. And then there was the icy fact that for some time Phil was also considered a prime suspect in Jane’s death, so not only did he suffer the loss of the woman he loved, but he also had to suffer through police interrogations, suspicion from all quarters, searches of his home and car, etc.